The Slavery Abolition Act of 1833 formally freed eight hundred thousand Africans who were then the legal property of Britain’s slave owners. What is less well known is that the same act contained a provision for the financial compensation of the owners of those slaves, by the British taxpayer, for the loss of their “property.” The compensation commission was the government body established to evaluate the claims of the slave owners and administer the distribution of the £20 million the government had set aside to pay them off. That sum represented 40 percent of the total government expenditure for 1834. It is the modern equivalent of between £16 billion and £17 billion.[2]
The well-established child migration scheme took a different turn when the abolishment of slavery left a labour shortage. The Children’s Friend Society was one agency that began to ship children to South Africa in the 1830s to fill this need. This agency was also one of the first to send child migrants to Canada in 1833. They sent approximately 230 British children, mostly to Upper Canada (present-day southern Ontario), between 1833 and 1836. This sending agency was assailed with criticism from the start. The accusations included the kidnapping and selling of children. However, they had the support of many important patrons, including Queen Victoria,[3] and we must keep in mind that they were following an established tradition that had been in place since 1619. Kidnapping was an accepted part of the process. The authorities either sanctioned it or turned a blind eye. In May 1839, an article in a London newspaper, The Operative, titled “Transportation and Sale of the Children of the Poor,” showed that not everyone supported the removal of Britain’s children: “These traffickers in juvenile human flesh, who now stand convicted before the country, not only of transporting the poor children, but of selling them to the Dutch boors at the Cape, at prices varying from 8/ to 10/ (shillings) per head.” The anti-slavery movement of the day might have influenced the British public, as the opposition to The Children’s Friend Society was strong, and in 1842 it was dissolved.
The loss of one society may have stalled the deportation of children to the colonies, but it did not stop it. It had not only become commonplace, it was also a lucrative practice and many agencies sprung up to carry on this work. By 1869, a number of philanthropists in Britain began to round up children to send to Canada. The children were powerless, and their voices were not heard. And as former British prime minister Gordon Brown stated in the foreword to this book, “It was wrong that our country turned its back and did not see the tears or hear the cries for help.”
In 1875, at the height of child migration to Canada, a man named Andrew Doyle was sent from Britain to report on how the child migrants were faring in their job of helping to settle the Canadian frontier. The resulting Doyle Report addressed the question of how to improve the process of child migration and included a number of observations that no one seems to have paid much heed to: “There appears to be nothing in the laws either of England or of Canada to prevent any person of a philanthropic or speculative turn, who can collect money for the purpose, from gathering any number of ‘waifs and strays and street arabs,’ and with their easily obtained consent shipping them to Canada.”
As Doyle visited the children in their Canadian work placements, he observed: “Some of the places indeed, are worse than a Board of Guardians would consent to place a child in England.” He criticized the fact that the children were presented in Canada as objects of pity: “It would surely be better to keep them at home, letting them take their chance of what Guardians can do for them amongst their own people.” He felt that the children, taken from the British streets and placed on Canadian farms without any training, “will be less fit for service in Canada than they would be in England, and to send them as emigrants can be regarded not as a way of improving their position, but simply of getting rid of them at a cheap rate.” Doyle felt that the placements the children were put in were “quite hard as, and in some respects more uninviting to the children, than the service in which at the same age they might be placed out in England.” He reported that he “was often painfully struck in speaking to children … with the sense of loneliness manifested by them.”
Doyle concluded that the employer often “gets the child’s service merely for its maintenance. Employers may naturally feel that none but children the most destitute would in such a country as Canada be bound to serve upon such terms. No class of Canadians would consent to accept such terms of service for their own children.”[4] Doyle openly criticized two philanthropists, Maria Rye and Annie Macpherson, for sending children to homes that were not vetted properly and for not being diligent in following up on how the children were managing in their work placements.
Maria Rye was responsible for shipping 4,200 to 5,000 children to Canada between 1868 and 1896. In a letter to The Times in London on March 29, 1869, entitled, “Our Gutter Children,” Rye argued, “Can anything I introduce them to in Canada or America be worse than that to which they are doomed if we leave them where they are now?” Interesting that this attitude has carried through in some circles, to this day. Through her use of the possessive our in describing the children, Rye let the world know that she felt entitled to claim ownership of the children’s future. Rye’s work, like Macpherson’s, had the support of the wealthy, and both continued shipping children to Canada in spite of the criticism. Rye sent children to Canada until 1896 and after 1896 the Church of England Waifs and Strays Society (The Children’s Society) took over. Rye died in 1903, but the Children’s Society continued to export children until the late 1930s. Even though Macpherson died in 1904, the Macpherson Homes carried on, and between 1870 and the 1920s close to ten thousand children were sent to Canada under this scheme.[5]
The children of the poor were treated as if they were expendable. They were unwanted material whose presence needed to be removed from the streets of England and carted away, as in Cruikshank’s depiction of “Our Gutter Children.”[6]
Cruikshank was against the transport of England’s innocent children to the colonies to be white slaves: “The proposition appears to me, like sweeping up the little girls, as so much mud out of our gutters, and pitching them into a mud cart, to be ‘shipped aboard of a ship,’ like so much guano, or like so many cattle, for a foreign market.”
Rebecca Ward, in An Alternative Approach to Child Rescue, argued that “by vilifying the children they worked with and alleging that they were the paupers and criminals of the future, emigrationists in Birmingham and Manchester promoted themselves as offering a cost-effective alternative approach to child rescue that contributed to the gradual purification of society.” The ongoing cost of caring for children in Britain versus the one-time cost of shipping them to the colonies was often put forth as an argument for the continuation of child emigration.
Authors Bean and Melville, in Lost Children of the Empire, argued that “all the organizations concerned with child migration differed in quality, methods, and philosophy, though for the children the end result was still exploitation and cheap labour.… Those who praise the philanthropists ignore one brutal fact: the children invariably didn’t want to go.”
Helen Boucher, in Empire’s Children, tells us that in Britain, “between 1885 and 1913, Parliament passed more than fifty pieces of legislation pertaining to child welfare, including the landmark 1889 Prevention of Cruelty to Children Act, which empowered local authorities to remove boys and girls from parents convicted of neglect as well as the 1908 Children and Young Persons Act which obligated official intervention in such cases. This flurry of lawmaking emboldened many child savers.” British law-makers appeared to ensure that the sending agencies were protected but not the children, nor their parents.
Children of the poor were sent to reform schools for slight infractions, and many reform schools had the authority to transport the children in their care to the colonies. Parents were judged against a system that gave them little power or control over their children. The list of those sending childre
n to Canada had grown to over 110 agencies by the time the Fairbridge Society started their farm school in British Columbia. Some agencies only dabbled at migrating children, while others shipped out thousands. The British government’s support of child migration was consistent throughout its 350-year history.
Almost fifty years after the Doyle Report, another study was requested in the face of continuing opposition to child migration to Canada. In 1924 the Canadian government invited the British Overseas Settlement Department to head a study to look at how child migration into Canada was being handled. A delegation led by Labour MP and trade unionist Margaret Bondfield was sent to Canada in November 1924. After a six-week tour of the children’s work placements, she presented her report. The Bondfield Report concluded that the existing system was “liable to abuse.” It recommended that no more children should be transported until they had reached the age of fourteen, the school-leaving age in Britain. The British government withdrew its financial support, and in April 1925, a Canadian Order in Council placed a three-year ban on unaccompanied children under the school-leaving age coming into Canada. In 1928 the ban was made permanent.
However, this did not stop the migration of British children to Canada. Barnardo Homes continued to send children, as did the Children’s Society. When the Fairbridge Society approached Thomas Dufferin Pattullo, premier of British Columbia in 1934, about opening a farm school for child migrants in that province, Pattullo had “no objection to children of the required age being brought from Great Britain to be cared for” by this society.[7] And so the Fairbridge Farm School was established near Cowichan Station on Vancouver Island in 1935, a full ten years after the initial Canadian government ban. (This was the second such school; the first Fairbridge Farm School opened in Pinjarra, Western Australia, in 1912.) Premier Pattullo allowed the age restriction to be bypassed because the Fairbridge Society claimed they would be responsible for the children in their care until they reached age twenty-one.
The Prince of Wales Fairbridge Farm School barely got off the ground before it started to crumble, and many of the safety nets promised to its inmates were not there when they were needed. The Second World War and changing ideas about child rearing were major factors in its collapse. Sherington and Jeffery, in Fairbridge: Empire and Child Migration, argue that the 1933 Children and Young Person’s Act “raised the question of the role of parents and the family … in the general welfare of children. Whereas much of the older policy of child welfare had depended upon the removal of children from their families, the modern conception now emerging suggested that the family and family relationships were crucial in the development of a child welfare system.” If anyone had taken the time to ask the children, most would have responded that their family was very important to them. Regardless of the shifting attitude against the removal of children from their families, the first party of forty-one child migrants arrived at the Fairbridge Farm School on September 25, 1935. All the children were under the age restriction suggested by Bondfield, and nineteen were between the ages of four and nine, with the eldest being thirteen. The Fairbridge Society sent Marjorie and her brother Kenny to this farm school in September 1937.
In 1944, twenty years after the Bondfield Report and almost seventy years after the Doyle Report, a B.C. superintendent of child welfare, Isobel Harvey, visited the Fairbridge Farm School. Harvey was asked to inspect the school after a member of the staff contacted the B.C. provincial child authorities to report ongoing instances of sexual perversion among the children under her care. There was also a sexual misconduct charge against one of the staff members at this time. This was the “in” that the province needed to make it past the wall of seclusion that the Fairbridge Farm School had maintained since its 1935 opening.
Harvey spent several days observing the day-to-day running of the farm school. The children were housed in cottages on the farm, with twelve to fourteen children per cottage. At the head of each cottage was a cottage mother. Harvey paid close attention to the dynamics in each cottage. The report of sexual perversion had to be investigated, but she found the reaction of the principal baffling. In her Report on a study made of Fairbridge Farm School during the month of August, 1944, she states, “When … homosexual activities which have so alarmed others were discussed with him [the principal], he stated that the British people are over-sexed.” The principal was the immediate head of the farm school, and his attitude toward the children would influence his staff. It was not just the hired hands and the older bullies that had their way with the children; I have been told by a number of former Fairbridgian males that they had their first sexual encounter with their cottage mothers. I don’t know if the boys saw it as abuse, but today we certainly recognize the dangers and the imbalance of power.
Harvey’s report criticized many aspects of the farm school life. Most importantly to me, her report confirmed the stories that my mother told me about much of her own life while in the hands of her wretched cottage mothers. Harvey stated that the “cottage mothers have too much power with the younger children, whom they discipline as they please. They lack sensitivity to the emotional needs of children, scream and shout at the children constantly, and are imbued with the Fairbridge doctrine that these children are different from Canadian children and must be shouted at and disciplined firmly, and that you must not be too kind to them.”
It is not difficult to imagine what the cottage mothers were like when they were not being scrutinized. The farm school was isolated, and there was little interaction with the outside community. Old Fairbridgians (children who had been placed out to work away from the farm school) told Harvey that “they were handicapped by their lack of knowledge of Canadians, their accents, their clothes and their inability to make friends.”
The children were sent away to be little Canadians, Britain’s empire builders, yet they were kept isolated at the farm school for several years, treated like worthless trash, given little knowledge of what they might find when they were placed out to work in the larger community once they turned sixteen, and expected to be model citizens for Fairbridge. There are a number of cases where children, two of whom had arrived at the Fairbridge Farm School at the age of four, knew nothing of the world beyond the gates. The principal, Harry Logan, had to admit, “It was found that several of the older boys had never left the Farm School during the whole of their stay at Fairbridge and were quite ignorant of such elementary things as using the telephone or buying their own street car or bus tickets.”[8] This isolation was a huge drawback for the children and added to their fear and loneliness once they were sent out to their work placements.
Harvey concluded:
A Child Welfare worker viewing Fairbridge is left with a feeling of helplessness. The basic idea, antagonistic to every concept of Canadian Child Welfare, that these children are poor English children and, therefore, different from the ordinary child, is rooted so firmly in practically every staff member’s mind that there is no use arguing against it. I was told over and over again by the Principal that I was incapable of understanding these children because they were English children. Anything they do, any trait they develop, is laid to the class from which they come.
The children were constantly reminded that they were second-class citizens in a country that did not want them in the first place. They were unworthy of kindness and love. Not all staff members in charge of the children took advantage of this attitude, but those who did were given a free rein, and the children were left to their own devices as to how to cope with the cruelty.
There are moments in history when past wrongs surface and refuse to remain concealed. British child migration to the colonies has been brought out into the light, and former child migrants and their families are gaining ground in their quest for answers and for this history to no longer be kept hidden. We will not be silenced any longer. The shame, so deeply rooted in many child migrant’s hearts, was for many passed down to their offspring, but today we know thi
s is not our shame and we will not rest until it has been placed squarely on the backs of the governments involved, where it belongs. There has been some progress, but as yet, it is not enough.
In 2001, as a result of the parliament of Australia’s report on child migration, “Lost Innocence: Righting the Record,” two major sending agencies went on record stating that it was wrong to send children overseas. In 2001, Barnardos Australia stated: “We have no hesitation in saying that it was a shameful practice, that it was barbaric, and that it was completely against any practices that we would currently uphold.” Barnardos sent some of the last child migrants to Australia in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The National Children’s Home also went on record, stating that it “is firmly of the view that child migration was a major mistake and we now deeply regret having taken part in it.”
Public apologies to Britain’s child migrants were given in November 2009 by the Australian government and then in February 2010 by the British government. This enabled many former child migrants and their families to begin to speak out about the betrayal and injustices brought about by this scheme. Instead of quietly fizzling out, the stories grew. Pandora’s Box had been opened and it was not possible to shut it again. On February 27, 2017, the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse, based in England, began its public hearings into the abuses so many children endured after being deported to the colonies. Such high-profile public apologies and inquiries have brought to light the darker side of British child migration, enabling a platform for the voices and stories of the former outcasts, which show clearly that deportation was certainly not the very best thing for each and every child.
It is time for the Canadian government to admit to its unwavering role in the migration of British children to this country for the purpose of their labour. In truth, some efforts have been made. On February 16, 2017, there was a motion in the House of Commons for such an apology. Luc Thériault (Montcalm, BQ) stated:
Marjorie Her War Years Page 2
